Carbon and other residue from gunpowder and from firearm discharge reactions accumulate on firearm components over time, with deleterious effects on cleanliness, performance, and longevity of the firearm. Firearm discharge residue accumulates on various firearm components that require disassembly of the firearm and subassemblies to access and clean the firearm. Even then, carbon and other discharge residue tend to be tenacious and difficult to remove. Some firearm components typically need to be scraped with a hard scraping tool to have discharge residue effectively removed, but this must be done without scratching or damaging the firearm components themselves. Various firearm components also have complex shapes that make cleaning discharge residue a challenge. For example, the bolt and bolt carrier of a 5.56 or 7.62 cartridge M4, M16 or AR15 sytle rifles have complicated shapes, such as the concave shape of the nose of the bolt, the complementary housing of the bolt carrier and the external surface of the elongated firing pin that have proven to be persistently difficult to clean effectively. A number of specialized scraping tools have been introduced to clean firearm components, but have had substantial shortcomings. See, for example, US Patent Application Publication No. US 2012/0186127, which is incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Although prior art bolt scraping tools can be useful and may be advantageous for certain applications, they suffer from drawbacks. One significant drawback is that a prior art bolt scraping tool may be adapted for scraping only the outer surface of a weapon bolt, whereas the bolt carrier into which the bolt slides can also benefit from a scraper contoured to fit the inner surfaces of the bolt carrier. The incorporated reference discloses both a bolt scraping tool and a bolt carrier scraping tool, as two separate tools.
An improvement in the scraper art is a unified cleaning tool adapted to scrape the outer surfaces of a bolt, the inner surfaces of a bolt carrier and the outer surface of a firing pin of such a firearm.